Thoughts On Twitter’s Promoted Trends

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After tasting the initial success of its Promoted Tweets, Twitter’s ambition grew.

Now, it plans to place advertisements on its prime asset – its trending topic leader board, dubbed as Promoted Trends. Of course, without much information, it is hard to debate whether it would attract dollars from businesses.

But judging from the success Twitter has enjoyed through its tweet-like ads, there are several key pointers, whereby the micro-blogging site can learn from to maximize Promoted Trends’ success rate.

System

Twitter’s Promoted Trends algorithm has to create a win-win system for all stakeholders – users, advertisers and Twitter. Clearly, Promoted Tweets has been on the right track that so far.

Promoted Tweets thrive on relevant content and high retweet counts. Advertisers win by receiving real-time statistics on how their ads perform. The bad ones are dropped, while the better ones remain in the system, pushing up the overall quality of the ads. It’s the survival of the fittest among the ads, whereby the gatekeepers are the users. The result is often an advertisement that satisfies both advertisers and users.

Measurement

A resonance score is used to judge how good or bad a Promoted Tweet is. While we can clearly see how it could be implemented on Promoted Tweets, it remains a challenge to measure the resonance score of a “trend”. A trend, as we all see for now, is a link, which shows (when clicked) what others are tweeting about a particular topic. Perhaps the resonance score could be based on the tweets that revolve around that particular paid trend, provided that the “trend” has users tweeting about it.

It remains to be seen how Twitter’s Promoted Trends works. But I’m pretty sure that measurement would certainly play a big part towards its success. Especially if Twitter wishes to maintain its exclusive resonance score metrics, which is so far adored by advertisers.

Non-Intrusive

Promoted Tweets aren’t intrusive. That is, an ad only appears in Twitter’s search results and not on our home page, as of yet. So, at least as an introduction, Promoted Trends has to come in subtly. The expansion can take place once we get used to promoted trends. Now, isn’t that an old trick that Facebook and Google once used?